This Explains Everything

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by Mr. John Brockman


  Kids that are raised with parents pointing out individual objects and saying, “See, it’s a ball. It’s red. Look, Johnny, it’s a red ball, and this is a cow, and look at the horsy” learn to speak, but so do kids who don’t have that patient instruction. You don’t have to do that. Your kids are going to learn ball and red and horsy and cow just fine without that, even if they’re quite severely neglected. That’s not a nice observation to make, but it’s true. It’s almost impossible not to learn language if you don’t have some sort of serious pathol­ogy in your brain.

  Compare that with chimpanzees. There are hundreds of chim­panzees who have spent their whole lives in human captivity. They’ve been institutionalized. They’ve been like prisoners, and in the course of the day they hear probably about as many words as a child does. They never show any interest. They apparently never get curious about what those sounds are for. They can hear all the speech, but it’s like the rustling of the leaves. It just doesn’t register on them as being worth attention.

  But kids are tuned for that, and it might be a very subtle tuning. I can imagine a few small genetic switches that, if they were just in a slightly different position, would make chimpanzees just as pantingly eager to listen to language as human babies are—but they’re not, and what a difference it makes in their world! They never get to share discoveries the way we do, or share our learning. That, I think, is the single feature about human beings that distin­guishes us most clearly from all others: we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Our kids get the benefit of not just what grandpa and grandma and great-grandpa and great-grandma knew. They get the benefit of basically what everybody in the world knew, in the years when they go to school. They don’t have to invent calculus or long division or maps or the wheel or fire. They get all that for free. It just comes as part of the environment. They get incredible treasures, cognitive treasures, just by growing up.

  I’ve got a list as long as my arm of stuff that I’ve been trying to get time to read. I’m going to Paris in December and talking at the Dan Sperber conference, and I’m going to be addressing Dan’s concerns about cultural evolution. I think he’s got some great ideas and some ideas I think he’s wrong about. So that’s a very fruitful disagreement for me.

  A lot of naïve thinking by scientists about free will

  “Moving Naturalism Forward” was a nice workshop that Sean Carroll put together out in Stockbridge a couple of weeks ago, and it was really interesting. I learned a lot. I learned more about how hard it is to do some of these things, and that’s always useful knowledge, especially for a philosopher.

  If we take seriously, as I think we should, the role that Socrates proposed for us as midwives of thinking, then we want to know what the blockades are, what the imagination blockades are, what people have a hard time thinking about—and among the things that struck me about the Stockbridge conference were the signs of people really having to struggle to take seriously some ideas that I think they should take seriously.

  I was struggling, too, because there were scientific ideas that I found hard to get my head around. It’s interesting that you can have a group of people who are trying to communicate. They’re not showing off. They’re interested in finding points of common agreement, and they’re still having trouble, and that’s something worth seeing and knowing what that’s about, because then you go into the rest of your forays sadder but wiser. Well, sort of. You at least are alert to how hard it can be to implant a perspective or a way of thinking in somebody else’s mind.

  I realized I really have my work cut out for me in a way that I had hoped not to discover. There’s still a lot of naïve thinking by scientists about free will. I’ve been talking about it quite a lot, and I do my best to undo some bad thinking by various scientists. I’ve had some modest success, but there’s a lot more that has to be done on that front. I think it’s very attractive to scientists to think that here’s this several-millennia- old philosophical idea, free will, and they can just hit it out of the ballpark, which I’m sure would be nice if it was true.

  It’s just not true. I think they’re well intentioned. They’re trying to clarify, but they’re really missing a lot of important points. I want a naturalistic theory of human beings and free will and moral respon­sibility as much as anybody there, but I think you’ve got to think through the issues a lot better than they’ve done, and this, happily, shows that there’s some real work for philosophers.

  Philosophers have done some real work that the scientists jolly well should know. Here’s an area where it was one of the few times in my career when I wanted to say to a bunch of scientists, “Look. You have some reading to do in philosophy before you hold forth on this. There really is some good reading to do on these topics, and you need to educate yourselves.”

  A combination of arrogance and cravenness

  The figures about American resistance to evolution are still de­pressing, and you finally have to realize that there’s something structural. It’s not that people are stupid, and I think it’s clear that people, everybody, me, you, we all have our authorities, our go-to people whose word we trust. If you want to ask a question about the economic situation in Greece, for instance, you need to check it out with somebody whose opinion on that is worth tak­ing seriously. We don’t try to work it out for ourselves. We find some expert that we trust, and right around the horn, whatever the issues are, we have our experts. A lot of people have their pastors as their experts on matters of science. This is their local expert.

  I don’t blame them. I wish they were more careful about vetting their experts and making sure that they found good experts. They wouldn’t choose an investment adviser, I think, as thoughtlessly as they go along with their pastor. I blame the pastors, but where do they get their ideas? Well, they get them from the hierarchies of their churches. Where do they get their ideas? Up at the top, I figure there’s some people that really should be ashamed of them­selves. They know better.

  They’re lying, and when I get a chance, I try to ask them that. I say, “Doesn’t it bother you that your grandchildren are going to want to know why you thought you had to lie to everybody about evolution?” I mean, really. They’re lies. They’ve got to know that these are lies. They’re not that stupid, and I just would love them to worry about what their grandchildren and great-grandchildren would say about how their ancestors were so craven and so arro­gant. It’s a combination of arrogance and cravenness.

  We now have to start working on that structure of experts and thinking, why does that persist? How can it be that so many influential, powerful, wealthy, in-the-public people can be so confidently wrong about evolutionary biology? How did that happen? Why does it happen? Why does it persist? It really is a bit of a puzzle, if you think about how embarrassed they’d be not to know that the world is round. I think it would be deeply embarrassing to be that benighted, and they’d realize it. They’d be embarrassed not to know that HIV is the vector of AIDS. They’d be embarrassed to not un­derstand the way the tides are produced by the gravitational forces of the moon and the sun. They may not know the details, but they know that the details are out there. They could learn them in 20 minutes if they wanted to. How did they get themselves in the posi­tion where they could so blithely trust people who they’d never buy stocks and bonds from? They’d never trust a child’s operation to a doctor who was as ignorant and as ideological as these people. It is really strange. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of that.

  This pernicious sort of lazy relativism

  A few years ago, Linda LaScola, who’s a very talented investigator, questioner, and interviewer, and I started a project where we found closeted nonbelieving pastors who still had churches and would speak in confidence to her. She’s a very good interviewer, and she got and earned their trust, and then they really let their hair down and explained how they got in the position they’re in and what it’s like. What is it like to be a pastor who has to get up and say the creed every Sunday when you do
n’t believe that anymore? And they’re really caught in a nasty trap.

  When we published the first study, there was a lot of reac­tion, and one of the amazing things was the dogs that didn’t bark. Nobody said we were making it up or it wasn’t a problem. Every religious leader knows. It’s their dirty little secret. They knew jolly well that what we were looking at was the tip of an iceberg, that there are a lot of pastors out there who simply don’t believe what their parishioners think they believe, and some of them are really suffering, and some of them aren’t, and that’s interesting, too.

  In phase two we’ve spread out and looked at a few more, and we’ve also started looking at seminary professors, the people that teach the pastors what they learn and often are instrumental in starting them down the path of this sort of systematic hypocrisy where they learn in seminary that there’s what you can talk about in the seminary, and there’s what you can say from the pulpit, and those are two different things. I think this phenomenon of systematic hypocrisy is very serious. It is the structural problem in religion today, and churches deal with it in various ways, none of them very good.

  The reason they can’t deal with them well is that they have a principle, which is a little bit like the Hippocratic oath of medicine: First, do no harm. Well, they learn this, and they learn that from the pulpit the one thing they mustn’t do is shake anybody’s faith. If they’ve got a parish full of literalists, young earth cre­ationists, literal Bible believers who believe that all the miracles in the Bible really happened and that the resurrection is the literal truth and all that, they must not disillusion those people. But then they also realize that a lot of other parishioners are not so sure; they think it’s all sort of metaphor—symbolic, yes, but they don’t take it as literally true.

  How do they thread the needle so that they don’t offend the sophisticates in their congregation by insisting on the literal truth of the book of Genesis, let’s say, while still not scaring, betraying, pulling the rug out from under the more naïve and literal-minded of their parishioners? There’s no good solution to that problem as far as we can see, since they have this unspoken rule that they should not upset, undo, subvert the faith of anybody in the church.

  This means there’s a sort of enforced hypocrisy in which the pastors speak from the pulpit quite literally, and if you weren’t lis­tening very carefully, you’d think: oh my gosh, this person really believes all this stuff. But they’re putting in just enough hints for the sophisticates in the congregation so that the sophisticates are supposed to understand: Oh, no. This is all just symbolic. This is all just metaphorical. And that’s the way they want it, but of course they could never admit it. You couldn’t put a little neon sign up over the pulpit that says, “Just metaphor, folks, just metaphor.” It would destroy the whole thing.

  You can’t admit that it’s just metaphor even when you insist when anybody asks that it’s just metaphor, and so this professional doubletalk persists, and if you study it for a while the way Linda and I have been doing, you come to realize that’s what it is, and that means they’ve lost track of what it means to tell the truth. Oh, there are so many different kinds of truth. Here’s where post­modernism comes back to haunt us. What a pernicious bit of in­tellectual vandalism that movement was! It gives license to this pernicious sort of lazy relativism.

  One of the most chilling passages in that great book by Wil­liam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is where he talks about soldiers in the military: “Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much senti­mentality and human reasonableness.” This is a very sobering, to me, a very sobering refection. Let’s talk about when we went into Iraq. There was Rumsfeld saying, “Oh, we don’t need a big force. We don’t need a big force. We can do this on the cheap,” and there were other people—retrospectively, we can say they were wiser—who said, “Look, if you’re going to do this at all, you want to go in there with such overpowering, such overwhelming numbers and force that you can really intimidate the population, and you can really maintain the peace and just get the population to sort of roll over, and that way actually less people get killed, less people get hurt. You want to come in with an overwhelming show of force.”

  We didn’t do that, and look at the result. Terrible. Maybe we couldn’t do it. Maybe Rumsfeld knew that the American people would never stand for it. Well, then, they shouldn’t go in, because look what happened. But the principle is actually one that’s pretty well understood. If you don’t want to have a riot, have four times more police there than you think you need. That’s the way not to have a riot and nobody gets hurt, because people are not foolish enough to face those kinds of odds. But they don’t think about that with regard to religion, and it’s very sobering.

  I put it this way. Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I’ll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army: same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They’re all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righ­teousness, and it’s as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.

  Which army do you want on the front lines? It’s very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you’re saying is that we’ll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It’s extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’— or philosophers’— sort of thinking, since it might lead to them think: Am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they’re doing the right thing? What if I’m clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It’s a dilemma that I don’t know what to do about, although I think we should confront it, at least.

  INDEX

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

  absurdity, 9–12

  Acton, Lord, 376

  Adams, Douglas, 384

  adaptation, 6–7, 43, 122–24, 157–58

  adolescence, 320–23

  aging process, 181

  alcohol, 352, 353

  Alexander, Richard, 43

  Alfvén waves, 70

  altruism, 44

  amphetamines, 329

  amputation, 57

  amygdala, 92, 266, 300

  animation, 269–70

  ant colonies, 97–98

  anticipatory salivation, 324–27

  antifragility, 350

  apathy, 283–84

  apparent motion, 269–72

  Aristotle, 13–14, 22, 178, 198–200, 218, 259, 261, 305, 356

  Arrhenius, Svante, 247–48

  arthropods, 163–65

  artificial intelligence, 93, 94–95, 122–23

  art-music connections, 227–29

  athletic contests, 47–49

  Atiyah, Michael, 145

  atomic theory, 31–32, 84, 196–200

  attention, 92

  Attneave, Fred, 6

  attraction, 98

  auditory cortex, 97

  autism, 301

  Avery, Oswald, 88

  Axelrod, Robert, 104–5

  Bacon, Roger, 305

  Bakker, Robert, 202

  Barlow, Horace, 5–8

  Baudrillard, Jean, 315–16

  Baxter, Lewis, 295

  Bayes, Thomas, 57

  Bayes’ Law
, 372–75

  beauty, 25–27, 30–33, 36–37, 37, 38–39, 106

  Beck, Aaron, 292–95

  bees, 328

  behaviorism, 22, 106–7, 324–27

  belief desire psychology, 121

  Bell Laboratories, 170, 171

  Bem, Daryl, 354–55

  Berkeley, George, 215

  Bernstein, Julius, 389–90

  Big Bang, 59, 66, 70, 71–74, 240

  birds, 157, 158, 183, 201–3

  Bishop, Bill, 50–51

  black holes, 78, 143, 197

  black markets, 353

  blank slate, 182

  Blech, Ilan, 32

  Bode, Johann, 75

  Bohr, Niels, 81, 259–60

  Boltzmann, Ludwig, 19–21, 61–62

  Bonner, John Tyler, 172–73

  Born, Max, 80

  Boscovich, Roger, 198–99

  bounded rationality, 94–95

  Bourke, Andrew, 155

  brain

  fetal testosterone, 265–68

  hemispheres, 92–93

  language acquisition, 99–101

  modular mind theory, 106–7, 108–11

  orderly map, 91–93

  brain imaging, 343–44

  Brooks, Frederick, 225–26

  Brownian motion, 372–73

  Buddhism, 175–76

  Bush, Vannevar, 170

  Cage, John, 227–29

  Cahn, John, 32

  Cameron, David, 333

  Campbell, Fergus, 204

  Cantor, Georg, 234–35, 365

  causation, 13–14, 149–51

  cell division, 71–74, 153–55

  chance, 356–58, 377–80

 

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